"The Hollow Men"
(read by Tom O'Bedlam)
by Craig Boehman
"I’ve been experimenting with several of the AI platforms, attempting to learn all that I can about how the systems work and how to produce the best images from the prompts that I provide. My favorite platform is Midjourney, which is what I used to create the images for this poem. It’s a relatively straight-forward process over all, but there is a bit of learning when it comes to some of the finer aspects of telling AI exactly what it is that you want. Whether then AI can actually provide you with your desired results is another issue altogether, as I’ve discovered first-hand over the past week.
Which brings me to "The Hollow Men" by T.S. Eliot, my favorite poem. I thought what better way to put Midjourney’s AI to the test? Surely, not even artificial intelligence can handle all of Eliot’s lines in a cohesive manner. I found this to be true. But in some cases, the visuals came pretty close to matching a visual interpretation of the lines. I’ll let you be the judge though.
For each of the images below, the corresponding lines from the poem were fed into the bot as prompts, exactly as written, no other commands given except to make the images all in a 3:2 ratio. Other than that, you’re seeing only the results from Eliot’s own words."
"The Hollow Men"
I
We are the hollow men,
We are the stuffed men,
Leaning together,
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless,
As wind in dry grass,
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar.
Shape without form, shade without color.
Paralyzed force, gesture without motion;
Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom,
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Remember us - if at all - not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men.
The stuffed men.
II
Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death’s dream kingdom,
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging,
And voices are
In the wind’s singing,
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.
Let me be no nearer
In death’s dream kingdom.
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat’s coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field,
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer -
Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom.
III
This is the dead land,
This is cactus land.
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man’s hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.
Is it like this
In death’s other kingdom,
Waking alone,
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness,
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.
IV
The eyes are not here,
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars,
In this hollow valley,
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms.
In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech,
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river.
Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual starm
Multifoliate rose
Of death’s twilight kingdom,
The hope only
Of empty men.
V
Here we go round the prickly pear,
Prickly pear prickly pear,
Here we go round the prickly pear,
At five o’clock in the morning.
Between the idea
And the reality,
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow.
For Thine is the Kingdom.
Between the conception
And the creation,
Between the emotion
And the response,
Falls the Shadow
Life is very long.
Between the desire
And the spasm,
Between the potency
And the existence,
Between the essence
And the descent,
Falls the Shadow.
For Thine is the Kingdom.
For Thine is,
Life is
For Thine is the...
This is the way the world ends,
This is the way the world ends,
This is the way the world ends,
Not with a bang but a whimper."
- T. S. Eliot
